-
Lifor posted an update 4 years, 9 months ago ·
Is it just me or is spamming article after article about steaming videos seem like a troll move. The bad kind not the otherkin kind. Sorry that is a poor choice of words. If somebody knows another word for internet trolls reply with it. If there isn’t another word let’s make one maybe.
They’re definitely bots. They’re a perennial problem that tends to run in waves. I’m not sure why Jarin isn’t able to get a handle on them. I guess they’re pretty clever these days in defeating captchas and the “move the slider and wait until it turns green” kind of thing that is used for logging in, or maybe there’s API weaknesses being exploited, or something. If it were me I would make every new account have to be manually approved, but maybe he doesn’t have the time for that kind of hands-on management.
Combination of things – some spam these days is actually done by humans who are being paid to do so as an actual job, other spam is now done by bots that are based on browser-automation technology so it’s very difficult to distinguish them from actual users, and wordpress as a platform is one of the most targeted for this sort of thing. I’ve been strongly thinking about moving away from it and to something built from the ground up with security in mind, but I haven’t had the time to work on that lately. I was resisting moving to approval-only because I really don’t have the time (this is the first time in about two weeks I’ve even had the chance to look at the site, much less do serious work on it) and it’s very very hard to distinguish legitimate users from spammers in advance. A lot of these, even with a manual process, I probably wouldn’t have weeded out until they actually began spamming.